Brazil Passes Package Of Environmental Laws

Bill Affords Amazon Greater Protection

February 17, 1998|By Laurie Goering, Tribune Staff Writer.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Although illegal loggers in the Amazon were fined $11 million last year, only 6 percent of the money was ever paid because of gaping legal loopholes that made the country's environmental regulations largely unenforceable.

The nation's environmental agency, IBAMA, "has been without authority to fine anybody for anything," complained Stephan Schwartzman, a senior scientist for the Washington-based Environmental Defense Fund.

That changed last week as Brazil passed a landmark environmental crimes bill that finally gives the nation with the largest rain forest and greatest biodiversity on Earth the power to protect its ecological riches.

The law for the first time classifies as crimes illegal logging, dumping of industrial pollutants and a host of other environmental violations and sets penalties as high as $45 million and four years in prison.

Key elements of the bill, including a provision that would have made setting runaway fires a felony, were vetoed by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, under heavy pressure from ranching and sugar cane interests.

But "even with all the defects it contains, this law is the difference between night and day" in terms of environmental protection, said Schwartzman, a critic of Amazon burning.

Sharp growth in deforestation and illegal logging in recent years has spurred IBAMA to fight back. In 1996 it cut from 50 percent to 20 percent the percentage of timber that could be cut on a forest parcel. Last year it made record seizures of wood and levied heavy fines. Most, however, were successfully challenged in court by loggers arguing that the agency had no statutory authority to impose fines.

"Despite good laws and a good constitution, we haven't had any good way to punish," said Eduardo Martins, IBAMA's president. The new law "reduces the impunity in Brazil," he said. "My prediction is we can reduce illegal timbering in the Amazon a lot this year."

Critics point to a variety of limitations in the new law. Congress in late January refused to include shareholders and corporate officials of logging companies among those who could be held liable for illegal cutting. Under the new law only those wielding chainsaws and their supervisors can be fined or jailed, which may limit the law's effectiveness.

Nonetheless, "This is the first time we've had any kind of real law," said Adalberto Verissimo, a logging expert at the Institute of Man and the Environment in Amazonia, a Belem-based center.

Burning may be a different story. Under the law originally passed by Congress, setting a fire to burn forest or other vegetation without adequate control measures--precisely what happens in the Amazon each year--could have brought felony charges and three years in prison.

Heavy lobbying by ranchers, who rely on burning to clear pastures, and sugar cane growers, who burn their canefields, led Cardoso to veto the measure, along with nine other sections of the bill.

IBAMA's president emphasized that the agency intends to control burning in the Amazon by other means, including enforcement of existing rules against burning, and by educating ranchers and farmers to the environmental dangers posed by out-of-control fires.

"This isn't a problem that can be solved with criminal law," Martins said. He admitted, though, that "the solution to Brazil's fire problem isn't close."

Philip Fearnside, a forest ecologist at the National Institute of Amazon Research in Manaus, notes that most ranchers and farmers have no low-cost alternative to burning property to clear brush and forest regrowth. Brazilian farm law also continues to classify forest as "unproductive" land, an incentive to farmers to burn as much timber as possible.

"Burning is the way that agriculture and ranching are done here. It isn't the kind of thing where you can have an IBAMA leaflet campaign saying, `Don't burn the forest' and expect people to change the way they behave," Fearnside warned.

Another troubling question for environmentalists is whether the new law will be enforced after it takes effect March 30.

IBAMA has long been criticized for having too few inspectors to keep tabs on an area nearly half the size of the continental U.S.

"People tend to think once you pass a law the problem is solved, but that's not the way it works in Brazil," Fearnside said.

Recent record fines and wood seizures, however, suggest IBAMA, particularly its Brasilia-based federal inspectors "are doing a better job than they're given credit for," said Schwartzman.